Boundless

The last book in the Shaws series is out next month, but instead of a straight "buy me," post, I'd prefer to talk about an aspect of the story.

Orphanages. At the start of Boundless, Livia is attacked by some skinny children from the orphanage she has just visited.
Georgian London had good ones and bad ones.

Thomas Coram's Foundling Hospital

The best was the famous Foundling Hospital which Thomas Coram helped to establish. A retired sea captain, he used his fortune to fund the school for children who needed a good upbringing. The children weren't strictly orphans, but they came from parents who could not afford to bring them up. In effect, the parents gave their babies away. They left little tokens so they could identify the child if they were ever in a position to reclaim them. The Hospital has a pathetic and terribly sad collection of them that you can go and see today. As far as is known, not one parent returned to claim their child, and if they had, since the tokens were removed it would have been almost impossible to recognise them.
The children were brought up strictly to be good Christians and to have a trade. Eventually they'd be apprenticed out or sent as servants somewhere.
And that was the good version.

In the bad one, like the one my heroine Livia visited, the orphanage was little better than a thieves' kitchen. they were taught a trade all right, but that might be pickpocketing or burglary. Remember Fagin in Oliver Twist? That was written when the rookeries were still swamps of filth and danger in the middle of London - turn the wrong way on The Strand and you could find yourself in an area the authorities left alone, and if you were wearing good clothes, you might not come out alive.
Livia mistakenly visits the kind of orphanage where children were trained to steal, and my hero has to rescue her. Oliver is very attracted to Livia, and astonished to see her in this part of London, but from that moment their fate is set.
And you'll have to read Boundless to find out what happens next!

*****

She’s the unlikely wallflower of the extraordinary Shaw family.  A woman who will never marry, but not for the reasons you might think . . .
 
Attacked on the streets of London, Lady Livia Shaw is relieved when a gentleman comes to her aid—and startled to discover her rescuer is Adrian, the Duke of Preston, a notorious rogue. But their association—and instant attraction—does not end there, much to the Shaws’ distress. For Livia was robbed of a memento—one that is both her most precious possession and a reminder of a shameful secret. It is a secret she knows will cause her to lose Adrian forever, yet he is determined to track down the thief . . .

Adrian never wanted to be anyone’s hero, but now he’s finding the prospect as pleasing as he does Livia’s company, and her beauty. Certainly he wants her in his bed, but what surprises him is how much she comes to mean to him. Which is why the revelation of her scandalous past is nearly his undoing. Arrogantly, he had assumed only he had the power to shock. But it is too late to turn back, and now Adrian may have to risk everything for Livia, even his heart . . .

You can preorder the book here!